Inside Road pictures Nov. 3rd 2011

[Pocketlint]

I'm your basic "point and shoot" guy with my lil Olympus VR310 point and shoot camera.
I drove the Inside road this morning from Fish Creek to Polebridge. Most of my pics are crap...
But these looked OK enough to post here.
I may add more pics if I can find anymore that are decent enough.
It was a gorgeous day but saw no animals Only 3 vehicles in the 5 hours I was out there. One was a Law Enforcement Ranger I BS'd with for a while. He pulled up while I was watching a open wooded hillside where I had seen 3 wolves a few years ago. He agreed it was a good place since he's seen them there too. Pics aren't great of the place but I'll post them anyway.

I know zip point (&*%(^ about software enhancement. All I did was increase "saturation" on these. It seemed to help some

pocketlint

Lake Winona

Lake Winona

Here's where I saw 3 wolves a few years back. It's a lil South of Logging Creek. Best is park down the road and walk back and sit by a big tree like the one I'm standing by. I was a weenie today since it was cold...so I sat in Squeeze eating my ham sandwich while glassing the area. That's when the Ranger came by. I think he saw my rifle(Big Bits) but he knew I wasn't poaching.

I like Ponderosa Pines, Montana's State Tree. The thick bark protects against fire damage

As you can see, this tree is still doing well

Spruce Grouse hen

Polebridge Mercantile. The fireplace made me do it

I can't get out of that place without a cinamon bun

[Jay w]

Enjoyed the phots, especially that self portrait. You can download Picasa for free, and it's simple. Actually, it's a pretty good way to pick out the photos you want to resize and export (to photobucket or whereever).

Jay

http://picasa.google.com/#utm_campaign= ... 20download

[netresult]

Nice pic's Pete! I love that drive also. We had a similiar experience as far as not seeing much wildlife and very few vehicles when we drove the outside road to Polebridge then on to Kintla and Bowman and back down the inside road all the way, shortly after it reopened. Nice shot of the grouse, I missed seeing any on our trip. I'm sure the hot weather had something to do with our lack of wildlife sighting the day we spent there. I hope they never improve those roads----keeps them much less traveled! Thanks for sharing the pic's

[toddnick]

Man, Fall sure is beautiful up there!!!!

I have never seen the fireplace in the merc going before...nice!!!

There is just no possible way that the average person can leave that place without at least a thousand calories worth of baked goods....

[Pocketlint]

Enjoyed the phots, especially that self portrait. You can download Picasa for free, and it's simple. Actually, it's a pretty good way to pick out the photos you want to resize and export (to photobucket or whereever).

Jay

http://picasa.google.com/#utm_campaign= ... 20download

Thanks for that link. I will probably download it.
I have the Olympus software which came with my camera. It's very good from what I see. You can do all sorts of manipulation of colors, etc.
My problem is I don't know what all those things do. I guess I'll get some pics and just experiment, trial and error.
One question though. I'm really bummed about "washed out skys". You have any suggestions for after the fact fixing sky scenes in pics?

Thanks
pete

[Jay w]

Pete,

In the film days (and even now) the solution to washed out skies was to use a graduated filter (dark on top, clear on the bottom). That's probably beyond the Olympus, so then next cool tool is one in Photoshop. It's the magic wand. It selects anything with nearly the same color and tone. (Range is adjustable.) So you can click on the sky and select at least most of the sky, and then you can darken the sky. The trick is to do this without it showing. So I usually select the sky and darken it a number of different times so there is not a single "line" that shows the darkening. So no big adjustments in one shot. Also, the "line" in each selection can be "feathered" with a feather command. So these are Photoshop ideas. In something like Picasa, I don't know how to do what I'm talking about except to adjust the contrast and overall brightness to make the sky and photo look closest to what you want.

There is another idea called HDR or high dynamic range. There are also free HDR programs out there where you can shoot say 3 or 5 photos of the same scene (in rapid sucession) that have different exposures. All these are imported into the software, and then you have sliders to make adjustments. I've never used the software except with a little experimentation in Photoshop (CS5 version has a basic version). A lot of people howl about the horrible look of HDR, and the Goose Island shot has that look to it, but I'm sure you can dial back the HDR look.

Jay

Jay

[Deb1741]

Nice pics.....I really like the first one. I love waking up at sunrise and sitting at the shore of a lake when there is no wind. It just takes your breath away.

We had planned on getting up to Polebridge on our August trip but we ran out of time doing all our hikes we ended up doing. Oh, well........ I guess that just gives us a reason to come back up that way soon.

Thanks for sharing your pics. Don't knock your p/s pics....they are very good. I've played around with photoshop which is fun but I've seen a lot of overdone pics online that drive me crazy. I guess I just like the natural look more.
Deb

[Pocketlint]

Hi Deb and JayW

Maybe I stated what I wanted wrong about using software.
And I'll use the first picture of Winona Lake is an example.

I almost drove right on by the lake, but did a double take when I realized how calm it was and the reflection was nearly perfect. So I stopped and took a number of shots from different spots. I did/do remember one thing my Dad, who was a good photographer, told me: Move around and frame your shots on the spot to minimize the need to "crop" them later. None of these were cropped. All are "full frame". Anyway, I could see that the sky was never gonna look good because the atmosphere was sorta hazy giving it a "flat" lifeless look. But the reflection of the hills was nearly perfect.
After looking at the pictures when I got back, I could see they were pretty "lifeless" which simply didn't do justice to the scene as I remembered it in my mind. I was really bummed out. The color of the larches contrasted with the evergreens was just beautiful...and it just didn't come through at all on the original pics
That's when I began playing with the software to see if I could improve things

I agree about "overdoing" software enhancement. All I was trying to do was try to make the scene look more like I remember it. And that's pretty much all I ever want to do with my pictures. The scenery in Glacier National Park doesn't need any "enhancement" from me God does a pretty good job with it! Does that make sense to y'all?

Not saying that all the pictures I see from all the great photographers on here aren't beautiful. But all I want is to try to recreate what I saw at the time.

So I'll probably limit myself to just adjusting contrast, brightness, and color saturation for now. I'm also going to try to play with the "ISO" and some of the other camera settings and not shoot everything in the "AUTO" mode.

Thank you all for your advice!

pocketlint

Here's another one of Winona Lake. Full frame with the tree on the right to give a little more depth and helps frame it better I thought. I also "tilted" it to try to get the horizon squared up better

Before enhancement. To me this seems sorta flat and lifeless compared to the top image

[Pocketlint]

I'm home today Nov5 doing this because I tweeked my back Friday morning putting on my socks of all things Then aggravated it loading and unloading a trailer load of booze at work so here I am playing with pictures this morning instead of out somewhere. Maybe later.

Here's another picture from that trip on the Inside Road...a "dead tree"....since I like "dead tree" pics
Here the fire was too intense for the bark to protect this Ponderosa Pine. Life springs anew all around the dead trees though as Nature does her thing
This picture was cropped.

pocketlint



Here's a cropped picture of the grouse hen while I was at it. Not quite as good as i thought at first. Maybe cause cam was fully zoomed out and hand held


I had a really tough time enhancing this pic. It's cropped too. The original was very dark. She was in shadow, fully zoomed at 240mm(35mm format) 42.5mm on this camera. It was in Auto mode and it chose f5.7 @1/125 ISO 80... and the light meter was center weighted. Too bad because she was looking right at the cam.

[Ear Mountain]

...All I was trying to do was try to make the scene look more like I remember it.

Making the scene look like you remember it is one good goal for your photographs. The problem comes from the fact that your eye can perceive a wider range of light to dark than the sensor in the camera. So having tHe camera expose for the sky will result in the ground being too dark. Expose for the ground and the sky will blow out. There are some ways to deal with that as Jay W mentioned. A point and shoot really can't use filters so you are left with correcting the exposure somehow.

1. You can let the camera set the exposure and then try to find a good balance when correcting it on your computer. Problem with this method is that if the sky is way over exposed there is no way to recover the details from the brightest areas. The same happens in reverse from the darkest areas. So you end up losing a lot of interesting details.

2. Take one image exposed for the sky and a second properly exposed for everything else. Then combine the images on your computer. You need software that lets you layer one image over the other. Once you have them layered you erase the parts of the top layer that are exposed wrong to let theccorrectly exposed part of the image come through. Once you have it the way you remember the scene you flatten the layers and save the image to a new file. This is the technique I use most often because once you've done it a few times you can get pretty fast at making the correction.

3. High Dynamic Range (HDR) software can achieve remarkable results if used correctly. Many go too far though and produce some pretty garish images that don't look natural at all. But HDR software requires multiple images of the scene which are then combined by the software. A tripod is essential to capture at least 3 images that are identical. This then requires quite a bit of set up time. I use this technique sometimes but only when I really want to capture a specific image.

[mikie]

Not all is lost:



I enhanced it in Photoshop. Better to be underexposed then overexposed.

[Pocketlint]

Hot ding dong!!! .
Maybe I need to buy Photoshop, but it's kinda spendy and I don't have the cash at the moment.

Well done Mikie and thanks !!


pocketlint

[mikie]

You can find Photoshop Elements on ebay for $10-15. You don't need the latest edition. I am still using PS Elements version 3. I have later editions (3, 4, 6, , but they work the same. the later editions have tiny little changes that I don't use anyway. Learning how to use it can be challenging. But, once you learn how it can do wonders for your photos.